The discovery and properties of pentaquarks

The pentaquarks are exotic baryons formed of four quarks and an antiquarks. Their existence has been discussed in the literature over the last 30 years or more, first in connection with kaon nucleon scattering data. The subject has been revived by the end of 2002 when experimental evidence of a narrow baryon of strangeness $S$ = + 1, and mass $M \simeq$ 1530 MeV has been found. This is interpreted as the lightest member of an SU(3)-flavor antidecuplet. Here we shall mainly review the predictions of pentaquark properties as e.g. mass, spin and parity, within constituent quark models. Both light and heavy pentaquarks will be presented.Comment: Plenary talk, MESON2004 Conference Proceedings, Crakow, June 4-8 200

Important configurations for NN processes in a Goldstone boson exchange model

We study the short-range nucleon-nucleon interaction in a nonrelativistic chiral constituent quark model by diagonalizing a Hamiltonian containing a linear confinement and a Goldstone boson exchange interaction between quarks. A finite six-quark basis obtained from single particle cluster model states was previously used. Here we show that the configurations which appear naturally through the use of molecular orbitals, instead of cluster model states, are more efficient in lowering the six-quark energy.Comment: 17 pages, RevTe

Nucleon-Nucleon interaction in a chiral constituent quark model

We study the nucleon-nucleon (NN) problem as a six-quark system in a nonrelativistic chiral constituent quark model where the Hamiltonian contains a linear confinement and a pseudoscalar meson (Goldstone boson) exchange interaction between the quarks. This interaction has a long range Yukawa-type part, depending on the mass of the exchanged meson and a short range part, mainly responsible for the good description of the baryon spectra. We calculate the NN potential in the adiabatic approximation as a function of Z, the separation distance between the centres of the two three-quark clusters. The orbital part of the six-quark states is constructed either from the usual cluster model states or from molecular orbital single particle states. The latter are more realistic, having proper axially and reflectionally symmetries. In both cases the potential presents an important hard core at short distances, explained through the dominance of the [51]{FS} configuration. However in the molecular orbital basis the core is less repulsive, as a consequence of the fact that this basis gives a better upper bound for the energy of the six-quark system. We calculate the potential for the 3S1 and 3S0 channels with two different parametrizations. We find a small (few MeV) attractive pocket for one of these parametrizations. A middle range attraction is simulated by the addition of a sigma-meson exchange interaction between quarks, of a form similar to that of the pseudoscalar meson exchange. The present study is an intermediate, useful step towards dynamical calculations based on the resonating group method.Comment: 12 pages, 3 eps figures (with aipproc.sty). Talk presented by D. Bartz at the International Workshop on Hadron Physics "Effective Theories of Low Energy QCD", Coimbra, Portugal, September 10-15, 199

Probabilities in nonorthogonal basis: Four--quark systems

Four-quark states may exist as colorless meson-meson molecules or compact systems with two-body colored components. We derive an analytical procedure to expand an arbitrary four--quark wave function in terms of nonorthogonal color singlet--singlet vectors. Using this expansion we develop the necessary formalism to evaluate the probability of physical components with an arbitrary four-quark wave function. Its application to characterize bound and unbound four--quark states as meson-meson, molecular or compact systems is discussedComment: Accepted for publication in PR

Effective Action Method for Computing Next to Leading Corrections of O(N)O(N) Models

We compute the corrections of next to leading order in the ${1 \over N}$ expansion to the effective potential of a system described by a Ginzburg-Landau model with $N$ components and quartic interaction, in the case of spontaneous symmetry breaking. The method we apply allows to generalize in a simple way the so-called Self-Consistent Screened Approximation (SCSA).Comment: p. 8, LATEX, DFF 193/9/199

On a three-body confinement force in hadron spectroscopy

Recently it has been argued that a three-body colour confinement interaction can affect the stability condition of a three-quark system and the spectrum of a tetraquark described by any constituent quark model. Here we discuss the role of a three-body colour confinement interaction in a simple quark model and present some of its implications for the spectra of baryons, tetraquarks and six-quark systems.Comment: 19 pages (RevTeX), addition of new material regarding the NN interaction, more accurate discussion of the baryonic case, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Skyrme density functional description of the double magic 78^{78}Ni nucleus

We calculate the single particle spectrum of the double magic nucleus $^{78}$Ni in a Hartree-Fock approach using the Skyrme density-dependent effective interaction containing central, spin-orbit and tensor parts. We show that the tensor part has an important effect on the spin-orbit splitting of the proton $1f$ orbit which may explain the survival of magicity so far from the stability valley. We confirm the inversion of the $1f5/2$ and $2p3/2$ levels at the neutron number 48 in the Ni isotopic chain expected from previous Monte Carlo shell model calculations and supported by experimental observation.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, typos corrected. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:nucl-th/070206